Just as Adobe once pioneered paper-based desktop publishing with its PageMaker software, FrameMaker makes the same claim for electronic publishing in the Internet era. First and foremost, FrameMaker lets you lay out your page content with a capable set of tools and wizards. You can assemble small or large documents of even hundreds of pages from separate files (which can be imported from Microsoft Word or WordPerfect files as well as PDF and other formats). You can also add hyperlinks and graphics to your document easily.

In testing, we assembled an "e-book" from a literary manuscript of over 200 pages, broken into a dozen chapters. FrameMaker includes solid word-processing abilities--even a spell checker and thesaurus--plus text and graphics layout tools, so it was easy to add chapter headings and tweak text as we created the larger document. A real strength here is that as you add pages, FrameMaker updates all links (along with page numbers) between the table of contents, chapters, and index. The application includes a separate book file format and offers templates for blank chapters and other book components, so you can create and store books easily. An absolutely indispensable feature here is the ability to search and replace words across all sections of a document.

Another notable strength of this upgrade is its support for today's electronic publishing standards. Once your FrameMaker documents are assembled, you can distribute them in HTML, PDF, and XML. A separate bundled utility, Quadralay's WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition, takes you even further, with support for XML with Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) and XSL. (These options let you view your content with more precise formatting within today's browsers.) In all, with its strong mix of layout features and support for a wide variety of electronic standards, FrameMaker will help anyone publish documents online successfully. --Rich Dragan--This text refers to the Windows version of this software.